The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to systems and methods for identifying bone marrow in images, and more particularly to detecting and segmenting images generated using computed tomography (CT) imaging systems to identify bone marrow.
Bone marrow is a radiosensitive tissue that is susceptible to damage from radiation exposure, such as from x-ray scans, CT scans, radioisotope administration, radiation therapy, etc. Thus, identification of bone marrow is important in order to evaluate and/or minimize radiation exposure to the bone marrow. For example, it is important to identify bone marrow during radiation therapies, such as radionuclide therapies to avoid myelotoxicity.
Methods to calculate radiation dose to bone marrow, for example the internal dosimetry schema of the Medical Internal Radiation Dose (MIRD), generally require knowledge of a patient's total skeletal active marrow mass. The value for this marrow mass cannot currently be directly measured. In order to measure the full mass of bone marrow, the inner part of each bone that is imaged must be identified. In current practice, this is performed manually by a user tracing the regions on the full body image slices of an imaged patient. This process is very tedious and time-consuming.